Guide to respectful religious decluttering​

However, when something is holy, such as a Torah scroll or a translation of a Jewish sacred work like the Talmud (the main source of Jewish law and religious beliefs), for example, and is in

disrepair, it’s disrespectful to throw it away, Zupan says. “We bury them in the earth in the same way that in Jewish tradition we bury a beloved person who has died,” she says. Jewish

cemeteries often have a special plot dedicated to these types of items and may periodically have ceremonies to bury Jewish prayer books. For Christian artifacts, Kenneth Doyle, priest of the

Diocese of Albany and a former spokesperson and Rome bureau chief for the Catholic News Service, says, “Canon law speaks about sacred objects that are blessed and says they should be

treated reverently, and that’s as specific as it gets.” So if an item is not “blessed,” it’s not considered “holy,” and it’s not something that needs special care when it comes to

disposal. Doyle cites the examples of statuary or a rosary (a chain, traditionally used during prayer, that’s made up of a series of beads, a small medal and a crucifix) that may have been

mailed out as a gift from a religious order. “Religious orders don’t customarily bless articles they send out,” Doyle says. In that case, those items could, technically, be thrown away.

BLESSED AND SACRED ITEMS However, palm fronds, symbols of peace and eternal life distributed during Palm Sunday services and which some parishioners might keep in their homes, are blessed.

“These should be burned,” Doyle says. “Most parishes invite people to bring palm fronds back, and they burn them on Lent the following year.” In Hinduism, according to Sanjay Mehta, past

general secretary of the World Hindu Council of America, holiness stems from an object’s use in _puja,_ or daily worship. Items such as pictures of Bhagwan (“blessed one” or God) and 

_murti_ (visible forms such as statuary), as well as spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana or Vedas, are are all considered sacred and must be handled with respect. “These can

be donated to family or friends or given to religious institutions,” Mehta says. Islam is fairly “artifact-free,” says Omer Abdullah, editor of _Islamic Horizons,_ the magazine of the

Islamic Society of North America. Practicing Muslims own prayer rugs, which Abdullah says are “symbolic and aesthetic. There’s nothing religious about it. We can pray on any clean surface,

like carpeting or flooring.”